“I don’t want any coffee.”
“Will you have ice cream?”
“I don’t want any ice cream, thank you. It cools my stomach.”
“You’ll be better when you get back up there, you’ll get television on. Get sat down in front of that.”
“Why should I want to watch the television?” he said quietly, looking away from a picture of the town bridge in the rain. “I don’t want any tea or supper, or any breakfast in the morning.”
He put his hands together for a moment and stared into the air with his solemn boyish eyes in his delicately boned dirty face. He fumbled suddenly in his pockets.
“You can’t smoke in here,” said the woman quickly. “I don’t think you can smoke in here; I thought I saw a sign which said no smoking because there’s food about, you see, oh, no: they won’t have that in here.”
When they got up to pay me he said,
“Nice to have a change.” His voice was intelligent, but soft and clouded, like the voice of an invalid who wakes up disoriented in the afternoon and asks a new nurse the time. “It’s a day out, isn’t it?” They had come over by bus from a suburb the other side of Huddersfield which he called Lock Wood or Long Wood. “Nice to have a change,” he repeated, “while the weather’s still good.” And before I could reply: “I’ve got a cold, you see, really it’s bronchial pneumonia, more like bronchial pneumonia. I’ve had it for a year. A year now or more: they can’t help you at these Health Centres, can they? My lungs seem inside out with it on a wet day-”
“Now get on,” the woman interrupted him.
Though his voice was so low they could have heard nothing, she grinned and bobbed at the other customers as if to apologise for him.
“None of that,” she said loudly to them.
She pushed him towards the door. “I’m not his wife, you know,” she said over her shoulder to me, “oh, no, more his nurse-companion, I’ve managed for two years. He’s got money but I don’t think I could marry him.”
She was like a budgerigar bobbing and shrugging in front of the mirror in its cage.
I looked out of the window half an hour later and they were still standing at the bus stop. Nothing could ever come of them. The meaning of what they said to one another was carefully hidden in its own broken, insinuatory rhythms. Their lives were so intricately repressed that every word was like a loose fibre woven back immediately into an old knot. Eventually a bus arrived. When it pulled away again he was in one of the front seats on the top deck, looking down vaguely into the florist’s window, while she sat some rows back on the other side of the aisle, wincing if he lit a cigarette and trying to draw his attention to something on part of the pavement he couldn’t possibly see from where he was.
When I told Mr. Ambrayses about them he was excited.
“That man, did he have a tiny scar? Beneath the hairline on the left side? Like a crescent, just visible beneath the hair?”
“How could I know that, Mr. Ambrayses?”
“Never mind,” he said. “That man’s name is Doctor Petromax, and he once had tremendous power. He used it cleverly and soon stood the thickness of a mirror from what we all seek. But his nerve failed: what you see now is a ruin. He found an entrance to Viriconium in the lavatory of a restaurant in Huddersfield. There were imitation quarry tiles on the floor, and white porcelain tiles on the walls around the mirror. The mirror itself was so clean it seemed to show the way into another, more accurate version of the world. He knew by its cleanliness he was looking into one of the lavatories of Viriconium. He stared at himself staring out; and he has been staring at himself ever since. His courage would take him no further. What you see is a shell; we can learn nothing from him now.”
He shook his head.
“Which cafe was that?” I asked him. “Do you know where it is?”
“It would not work for you, any more than it did for him, though for different reasons,” Mr. Ambrayses assured me. “Anyway, it is known only by the description I have given.”
He said this as if it was remote, on no map. But a cafe is only a cafe.
“I think I recognise it. In the steam behind the counter is a photo of an old comedian. Two men with walking sticks and white hair smile feebly at a round-shouldered waitress!”
“It would not work for you.”
“That man’s name is Dr. Petromax.”
Mr. Ambrayses loved to preface his statements like this. It was a grammatical device which allowed him to penetrate appearances.
“That boy,” he would say, “knows two incontrovertible facts about the world; he will reveal them to no one.”
Or:
“That woman, though she seems young, dreams at night of the wharfs of the Yser Canal. By day she wears beneath her clothes a garment of her own design to remind her of the people there, and their yellow lamps reflected with such distinctness in the surface of the water.”
On a steep bank near my house was a domestic apple tree which had long ago peacefully reverted amid the oaks and elder. When I first drew his attention to it Mr. Ambrayses said, “That tree has no name in botany. It has not flowered for ten years.” The next autumn, when the warm light slanted down through the drifting willow-herb silk, hundreds of small hard reddish fruits fell from it into the bracken; in spring it bore so much blossom my neighbours called it “the white tree.”
“It bears no flowers in Viriconium,” said Mr. Ambrayses. “There, it stands in a courtyard off the Plaza of Realised Time, like the perfect replica of a tree. If you look back through the archway you see clean wide pavements, little shops, white-painted tubs of geraniums in the sunlight.”
“That man’s name is Dr. Petromax.”
Rilke describes a man for whom in a moment more, everything will have lost its meaning, and that table and the cup, and the chair to which he clings, all the near and commonplace things around him, will have become unintelligible, strange and burdensome, and who nevertheless only sits and waits passively for the disaster to be complete. To an extent, I suppose, this happens to us all. But there was about Dr. Petromax that vagueness which suggested not just injury but surrender, a psychic soreness about the eyes, a whiteness about the mouth, as if he was seeing the moment over and over again and could not forget it no matter how he webbed himself in with the aboriginal woman in the yellow coat. He did no work. He went constantly from cafe to cafe in Huddersfield; I had no means of knowing why, although I suspected-quite wrongly-at the time that he had forgotten which lavatory the mirror was in, and was patiently searching for it again.
I followed him when I could, despite Mr. Ambrayses’s veto; and this is what he told me one afternoon in the Four Cousins Grill amp; Coffee Lounge:
“When I was a child my grandmother often took me about with her. I was a quiet boy already in poor health, and she found me at least as easy to manage as a small dog. Her habits were fixed: each Wednesday she visited the hairdresser and then went on to Manchester by train for a day’s shopping. She wore for this a hat made entirely out of pale pink, almost cream feathers, dotted among which were peacock eyes a startling brown-red. The feathers lay very dense and close, as if they were still on the breast of the bird.
“She loved cafes, I think because the life that goes on in them, though domestic and comfortable, can’t claim you in any way: there is nothing for you to join in. ‘I like my tea in peace,’ she told me every week. ‘Once in a while I like to have my tea in peace.’
“Whatever she ate she coughed and choked demurely over it, and for some time afterwards; and she always kept on her light green raincoat with its nacreous, gold-edged buttons.
“When I remember Piccadilly it isn’t so much by the flocks of starlings which invaded the gardens at the end of every short winter afternoon, filling the paths with their thick mouldy smell and sending up a loud mechanical shrieking which drowned out the traffic, as by the clatter of pots, the smell of marzipan or a match just struck, wet woollen coats hung over one another in a corner, voices
reduced in the damp warm air to an intimate buzz out of which you could just pick a woman at another table saying, ‘Anyway, as long as you can get about,’ to which her friend answered immediately,
“ ‘Oh, it’s something, isn’t it? Yes.’
“On a rainy afternoon in November it made you feel only half awake. A waitress brought us the ashtray. She put it down in front of me. ‘It’s always the gentleman who smokes,’ she said. I looked at my grandmother sulkily, wondering where we would have to go next. At Boots she had found the top floor changed round again, suddenly full of oven gloves, clocks, infrared grills; and a strong smell of burning plastic had upset her in the arcades between Deansgate and Market Street.
“Along the whole length of the room we were in ran a tinted window, through which you could see the gardens in the gathering twilight, paths glazed with drizzle giving back the last bit of light in the sky, the benches and empty flower beds grey and equivocal-looking, the sodium lamps coming on by the railings. Superimposed, on the inside of the glass, was the distant reflection of the cafe: it was as if someone had dragged all the chairs and tables out into the gardens, where the serving women waited behind a stainless-steel counter, wiping their faces with a characteristic gesture in the steam from the bain marie, unaware of the wet grass, the puddles, the blackened but energetic pigeons bobbing round their feet.
“As soon as I had made this discovery a kind of tranquillity came over me. My grandmother seemed to recede, speaking in charged hypnotic murmurs. The rattle of cutlery and metal trays reached me only from a great distance as I watched people come into the gardens laughing. They were able to pass without difficulty through the iron railings; the wind and rain had no effect on them. They rubbed their hands and sat down to eat squares of dry Battenburg cake and exclaim ‘Mm’ how good it was. There they sat, out in the cold, smiling at one another: they certainly were a lot more cheerful out there. A man on his own had a letter which he opened and read.
“ ‘Dear Arthur,’ it began.
“He chuckled and nodded, tapping a line here and there with his finger as if he was showing the letter to someone else, while the waitresses went to and fro around him, for the most part girls with white legs and flat shoes, some of whom buttoned the top of their dark blue overalls lower than others. They carried trays with a thoughtless confidence, and spoke among themselves in a language I longed to understand, full of ellipses, hints, and abrupt changes of subject, in which the concrete things were items and prices. I wanted to go and join them. Their lives, I imagined, like the lives of everyone in the gardens, were identical to their way of walking between the tables-a neat, safe, confident movement without a trace of uncertainty, through a medium less restrictive than the one I was forced to inhabit.
“ ‘Yes, love’ I would say to introduce myself. ‘Thank you, love. Anything else, love? Twenty pence then, thank you, love, eighty pence change, next please. Did Pam get those drop earrings in the end, then? No, love, only fried.’
“ ‘I think it’s just as well not to be,’ they might reply. Or with a wink and a shout of laughter, ‘Margaret’s been a long time in the you-know-where. She’ll be lucky!’
“At the centre or focal point of the gardens, from which the flower beds fell back modestly in arcs, a statue stood. Along its upraised arms drops of water gathered, trembled in the wind, fell. One of the girls walked up and put her tray on a bench next to it. She buried her arms brusquely in the plinth of the statue and brought out a cloth to wipe her hands. This done, she stared ahead absently, as if she had begun to suspect she was caught up in two worlds. Though she belonged to neither her image dominated both of them, a big plain patient girl of seventeen or eighteen with chipped nail varnish and a tired back from sorting cutlery all morning. Suddenly she gave a delighted laugh.
“She looked directly out at me and waved. She beckoned. I could see her mouth open and close to make the words ‘Here! Over here!’
“She’s alive, I thought. It was a shock. I felt that I was alive, too. I got up and ran straight into the plate-glass window and was concussed. Someone dropped a tray of knives. I heard a peculiar voice, going away from me very fast, say: ‘What’s he done? Oh, what’s he done now?’ Then those first ten or twelve years of my life were sealed away from me neatly like the bubble in a spirit level-clearly visible but strange and inaccessible, made of nothing. I knew immediately that though what I had seen was not Viriconium, Viriconium nevertheless awaited me. I knew, too, how to find it.”
People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?
“You would learn nothing from Dr. Petromax’s mirror even if you could find it,” Mr. Ambrayses said dismissively. “First exhaust the traditional avenues of the research.” And as if in support of his point he brought me a cardboard box he had found among the rubbish on a building site in Halifax, the words World Mosaic printed boldly across its lid. But my face was down to the bone with ambition.
Old people sit more or less patiently in railway carriages imagining they have bought a new bathroom suite, lavender, with a circular bath they will plumb-in themselves. April comes, the headlines read, BIBLE BOY MURDERED; KATIE IN NUDE SHOCK. The sun moves across the patterned bricks outside the bus station, where the buses are drawn up obliquely in a line: from the top deck of one you can watch in the next a girl blowing her nose. You don’t think you can bear to hear one more woman in Sainsbury’s saying to her son as she shifts her grip on her plastic shopping bag with its pink and grey Pierrot, “Alec, get your foot off the biscuits. I shan’t tell you again. If you don’t get your foot off the biscuits, Alec, I shall knock it straight on the floor.”
April again. When the sun goes in, a black wind tears the crocus petals off and flings them down the ring road.
“I can’t wait,” I told Mr. Ambrayses.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I followed Dr. Petromax from the Blue Rooms (“Meals served all day”) to the Alpine Coffee House, Merrie England, the Elite Cafe amp; Fish Restaurant. I let him tell me his story in each of them. Though details changed, it remained much the same: but I was certain he was preparing himself to say more. One day I kept quiet until he had ended as usual, “Viriconium nevertheless awaited me,” then I said openly to him:
“And yet you’ve never been there. You had the clue as a child. You found the doorway but you never went through it.”
We were in the El Greco, at the pedestrian end of New Street. While he waited for the waitress he stared across the wide flagged walk, with its beech saplings and raised flower beds, at the window of C amp;A’s, his sore brown eyes full of patience between their bruised-looking lids. When she came she brought him plaice and chips. “Oh, hello!” she said. “We haven’t seen you for a while! Feeling any better?” He ate the chips one by one with his fork, pouring vinegar on them between every mouthful, only afterwards scraping the white of the plaice off its slippery fragile skin until he had the one in a little pile on the side of the plate and the other intact, glistening slightly, webbed with grey, in the middle. His dirty hands were as deft and delicate as a boy’s at this. Once or twice he looked up at me and then down again.
“Who told you that?” he said quietly when he had finished eating. “Ambrayses?”
He put down his knife and fork.
“Three of us set out,” he said. “I won’t say who. Two got through easily, the third tried to go back halfway. On the right day you can still catch sight of him in the mirror, spewing up endlessly. He doesn’t seem to know where he is, but he’s aware of you.
“We lived there for three months, in some rooms on Salt Lip Road behind the Rue Serpolet. The streets stank. At six in the morning a smell so corrupt came up from the Yser Canal it seemed to blacken the iron lamp-posts; we would gag in our dreams, struggle for a moment to wake up, and then realise that the only escape was to sleep again. It was winter, and everyt
hing was filthy. Inside, the houses smelled of vegetable peel, sewage, perished rubber. Everyone in them was ill. If we wanted a bath we had to go to a public washhouse on Mosaic Lane. The air was cold; echoes flew about under the roof; the water was like lead. Sometimes it was hardly like water at all. There were some famous murals there, but they were so badly kept up you could make furrows in the grease. Scrape it off and you’d see the most beautiful stuff underneath, chalky reds, pure blues, children’s faces!
“We stuck it for three months. We knew there were other quarters of the city, where things must be better, but we couldn’t find our way about. At first we were so tired; later we thought we were being followed by some sort of secret police. Towards the end the man I was with was ill all the time; he started to hear the bathhouse echoes even while he was in bed; he couldn’t walk. It was a hard job getting him out. The night I did it you could see the lights of the High City, sweet, magical, like paper lanterns in a garden, filling up the emptiness. If only I’d gone towards them, walked straight towards them!”
I stared at him.
“Was that all?” I said.
“That was all.”
His hands had begun to tremble, and he looked down at them. “Oh, yes. I was there. What else could have left me like this?” He got up and went to the lavatory. When he came back he said, “Ambrayses has a lot to learn about me.” He bent down, his eyes now looking very vague and sick, as if he was already forgetting who I was or what I wanted, and quickly whispered something in my ear: then he left.
As he walked across the street he must have disturbed the pigeons, because they all flew up at once and went wheeling violently about between the buildings. As they passed over her an Indian woman, who had been sitting in the sunshine examining a length of embroidered cloth, winced and folded it up hurriedly. Though they soon quietened down, coming to rest in a line along the top of the precast C amp;A facade, she continued to look frightened and resentful-biting her lips, making a face, moving her shoulders repeatedly inside her tight leather coat, from the sleeves of which emerged thin wrists and hands, powdery brown, fingernails lacquered a plum colour.
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